The Practice of Subjectification in the Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article is devoted to the analysis of philosophical constructions of Marcus Aurelius, one of the representatives of late Stoicism. The interest in the works of the last “good emperor” is connected with the historical study of Michel Foucault, aimed at studying the ethical teachings of Marcus Aurelius and his declared practices of self-care. The work carried out by the French thinker, on the one hand, is deeply interesting from the point of view of inte- grating Stoic practices into the general concept of subjectification, i.e., the self-construction of human subjectivity. On the other hand, Foucault’s analysis is not systematic, and his idea of Marcus Aurelius is presented in a fragmented and generalized way. The aim of this article is to provide a systematic overview of the practices of subjectification (self-care) found in his correspondence with Fronton and in his diary, entitled Alone with Myself. Among the practices presented are the following: the technique of writing oneself, the inspection of consciousness, spiritual cognition, the exercise of memory, and the exercise of the last day. The article shows what variations of these exercises are found in other philosophers of antiquity, and how far these techniques of self-care transformed with the development of Stoicism. The analysis points out exactly how each practice should influence the forma- tion of subjectivity, and how the subject should be formed in the view of the philosophers of late Stoicism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".